A Plea From a Former Prude Teacher's Student - Part 3
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
GUEST BLOGGER!
Lex and I after our first show together.
Oh hello there! The name’s Derek! But you may know me better as “George”: the tuxedo-clad, ring-pop-bearing proposer or, more recently, as the 15 year old Catholic school boy who told Lexie to get her shit together and teach me how to pantomime sexual intercourse on stage. Of course, she only let me get away with something like that because she is the big sister I never had.
After I read Part I of this series, I was flooded with nostalgia and immediately texted Big Sis Lexie to reminisce about a show that was a turning point in my young life.
This was the first time I was being trusted with a role of this caliber. This was a serious show, with serious content; therefore taking on this character was serious business. However, from ages 9-15, acting had been little more than an enjoyable pastime, right up there with ice hockey; but now I was a sophomore in high school and after three concussions, I began to direct my focus solely towards the theatre. I even began voice lessons with a new teacher who promised to be brutally honest with me at all times. So honest in fact, she told me that I may not be able to pull off a leading male role. After she saw me as Melchior, she apologized! I wrote about this show in my college essay. I had parents come up to me telling me I made them cry. I even broke down after a couple of performances. For the first time I felt that this may be something I can do with the rest of my life.
But one of my favorite things about this whole experience is when I reflect on how it affected my relationship with my parents.
If you can’t tell by now, I am an only child. SHOCKER! I KNOW! I am indeed an only child who is blessed to have always had a wonderful relationship with my parents. For starters, they have been so unbelievably supportive of my artistic pursuits since day one. Up until college, they never missed a single performance of a show I was in (even then, they still made the five hour drive up to Cambridge for at least one performance of every show in college.). Their streak included all 8 performances of Spring Awakening. The only thing that made my co-lead and I more nervous about simulating a sexual act on stage in front of our parents, was knowing that they almost always sat together. I guess misery really does love company, because even we knew that was a bad idea!
My mother recently revealed to me that she and my father had a long chat about their concerns before I even auditioned for the show. That wasn’t too shocking to hear. I’ve told you my mother and father are supportive and enthusiastic about the theatre and that they have always been loving parents but you see, it was well known that my family and I are Church-goin’, non-cussin’ family. Spring Awakening was not exactly their kind of show. At 15 years old I was still very aware that they were indeed my Parents: authority figures whose final word was law (well, maybe that’s because they are both lawyers…but I digress). There was no way they were going to let me do this show. And it’s not that my parents were the prudish sort, I mean, c’mon, my dad and I would listen to Eminem on the way to hockey practice. However, we would only play the clean versions of his songs. I was allowed to watch The Hangover but was told I better close my eyes when I was told to (it would be a few years before I would ever see those end credits). And when I wanted to listen to the Rent soundtrack at age 11, they went through the song list and told me which songs I was allowed to listen to. I still remember sitting in rehearsal for choir at my church in Randolph, New Jersey, jealous of the kids who were listening to Spring Awakening on their iPods because I wasn’t allowed to. So when I came to them three years later with my hat in hand asking to actually be performing the material from that same show, I was very nervous.
But now for the first time, even though I knew something may be a little racier and out of my family’s comfort zone, I really really wanted to be a part of it, and I was ready to fight for it. To be able to audition, I knew we would have to have a longer conversation where I would lay out my reasons for why I was ready to confront the material and where I would listen to my parents’ concerns. Once I had been cast in the role, Lexie and our director pulled me aside during the first rehearsal apologizing that they had overlooked something. Melchior’s character was an avowed atheist with a potty mouth and passions of the flesh, and they thought I may want to run that by my parents before we go any further into the rehearsal process. And just like when I listened to non-explicit lyrics, closed my eyes when Heather Graham flashed Ed Helms, and skipped over “Contact” when listening to Act II of Rent...I did.
As we were rehearsing the show, my parents and I spoke about topics that we normally would have probably avoided in a typical mother-father-son chat (those usually didn’t involve discussions of suicide, masturbation, sex, or domestic abuse). In essence, we had an adult conversation, (the first of many to come) where my parents and I would begin to grow in how we all viewed each other: for me, in starting to understand my parents aren't just my parents, they’re human beings with their own fully fledged lives and, for my parents, in seeing me as more than just their little boy
It’s funny, my mom seems to alternate between Melchior being her favorite and her least favorite role she has ever seen me in, and as previously mentioned, she has seen everything. It wasn’t until I was in college that she would admit how hard it was for her to sit through Spring Awakening each night: “I didn’t like seeing my son like that. I didn’t know you had that in you.” Still, she was there, at every … single… performance. And to be clear, it wasn’t the intimate scenes that made her the most upset (though perhaps a little squeamish); it was the scene where Melchior physically abuses Wendla and when he collapses in tears with a razor blade to his neck. This was the first show that wasn’t a Bye Bye Birdie or a Drowsy Chaperone where her son melted into the glitz and glamor of a theatrical world; it was as if she saw her actual son doing all these things in a world similar to our own. And though she did not expect anything like the events of the play to transpire in my own life, there was a darkness I had to access –a side of her son she hadn’t seen before. It was a side both my parents would see more of during my senior year of high school when I was diagnosed with Depression and OCD. Not that any of us were prepared for challenges this would hold, but I felt more prepared to take this on. This time I knew how to advocate for myself. There was little that seemed embarrassing or taboo to talk to my parents about and I knew that through it all, as long as I was open and unafraid to talk about things that were uncomfortable, I would always have support.
From the first day of the process, this show forced me, my friends, my teachers and ultimately my family, to confront questions about ourselves or events in our lives we hadn’t had the opportunity or courage to before. I look back on the experience and I think that when my parents finally saw a new side of their son, they transitioned from being just my parents, to my best friends. There is nothing we don’t talk about now; hell, we even curse in front of each other.
Allowing teenagers to immerse themselves in shows like Spring Awakening is more than giving a student a chance to explore their craft–it’s about providing an opportunity to explore themselves. Get your minds out of the gutter! I don’t mean exploring ourselves like that! Let’s be honest though, while rehearsing that show we were all of an age where our minds were full of questions and anxieties and…“scaries” as Lexie calls them. There were even some of us [*raises hand*] whose school taught abstinence in lieu of actual sexual education. But here’s the real truth, we weren’t in need of the specifics, techniques, or choreography when it came to our teenage hormones. All I remember is needing a space to explore the emotions that decided to tag along with all the puberty. So when I couldn’t find answers at school, I had the theatre. I had a show whose plot directly addressed the scaries going on in my life, I had a cast of supportive friends with whom I could wade through the trenches of puberty, and I had teachers who did not shy away from material they knew was beneficial to their students (ya know...except Lexie for some of the process). Shows like Spring Awakening are the conduits for actors, teachers, and families to encounter and embrace their lives through the theatre.
